Weblog of Joshua W. Herring

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Monthly Archives: January 2012

Interesting article in The Economist about Alabama’s immigration experiment – in which they seriously crack down on illegal immigration. And it has a dramatic teaser: an executive at MERCEDES was recently detained and jailed because he only had a German ID on him! HA! I’m as against Alamba’s law as any libertarian should be –…

Can’t spend too much time blogging now, but I can recycle things that I’ve posted on Facebook! Backstory – a friend posts a photo showing US national debt analogized to household debt, making the point that it’s like a family that earns 50K/yr owing over 150K on their credit cards. Is this misleading? You betcha!…

I’m no fan of Mitt Romney, but one thing that’s starting to annoy me about the campaign is all the grousing about how much money he has. SO WHAT? Here’s how silly this is. Barack Obama is worth $10million, and that’s on the LOW side for a sitting president. I don’t resent this one bit…

As part of the blanket internets SOPA protest today, there’s a #FactsWithoutWikipedia hashtag on Twitter. It’s not really worth your time – typical internet mostly unfunny people trying to get attention. But one of them really stuck out: Suicide increases life expectancy. THAT seems like the kind of golden ticket factoid that academics dream of…

Jonah Goldberg’s latest bit of snark is nice illustration of the stupidity of book romanticists. Tongue firmly in cheek, he’s urging people to go out and quote false facts to high schoolers because: …they will have no choice but to believe you as they will have no idea how to use, never mind find, a…

The places where human needs are best met are not those in which aggrieved majorities swoop in and suddenly confiscate 3/4 of the assets of successful capitalists. They are places that don’t do that. Will Wilkinson, doing a nice takedown of Brian Leiter’s defense of Marxism over at BigThink.

Yes, well, we’re headed to a full-blown posts category for Bleeding Heart Libertarians, but today it’s just a quibble. Steve Horwitz posts, in response to Pete Boettke’s question of whether we need the “Bleeding Heart” in front of “Libertarians,” that we most emphatically do! – and that’s because otherwise people like Jeffrey Sachs will forget…

One of these days I’m going to learn to stop making political predictions. In November I posted something saying that Huntsman had the most to gain from a Cain exit. So my two cents is that Gingrich is not here to stay, Romney probably is, and Huntsman will pick up the spoils. And the thing…

There’s an interesting infographic on Bill Gates over at Frugal Dad that puts a lot of things about the foreign aid budget in perspective for me. Basically, it claims that Bill Gates has saved over 6million lives through his charitable giving, which now amounts to $48billion and nearly half of his net worth. And it…

Reason posts an entertaining video of editor-in-chief Matt Welch worming his way out of Neil Cavuto’s attempts to get him to answer a false forced-choice between Mitt Romeny and Barack Obama for president. Welch stays on message: he does have more than two choices, so it’s a pointless question, let’s talk about Ron Paul instead.…